shred is probably not going to do what you want it to do as I suspect you are running a modern file system.

manpage wrote:CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the file system overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy this assumption. The following are examples of file systems on which shred is not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in all file sys‐ tem modes:

* log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied with AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)

As notfred notes, shred probably isn't doing what you think it is if you're running a journaling file system (ext3, jfs, ntfs, etc.) To be truly effective at removing all traces of the sensitive data, you would need to shred the entire raw partition and reformat.

If you're intent on using it anyway, using the find command to recurse through the directory tree and invoke shred is the way to do it. But all you'd really be doing is giving yourself a false sense of security.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

Thanks for the heads up before I start wasting my time with that command. I don't want to compromise myself with a false sense of security either. I found shred mentioned in Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two but saw no mention of the drawbacks.

Looks like notfred and I may have jumped the gun a bit. If you're using ext3 with default settings, shred may still be of some value:

shred man page wrote:In the case of ext3 file systems, the above disclaimer applies (and shred is thus of limited effectiveness) only in data=journal mode, which journals file data in addition to just metadata. In both the data=ordered (default) and data=writeback modes, shred works as usual. Ext3 journaling modes can be changed by adding the data=something option to the mount options for a particular file system in the /etc/fstab file, as documented in the mount man page (man mount).

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson